President Donald Trump repeated some misleading claims this week as he made the rounds on conservative radio talk shows, delivered a speech to a conservative group and held a press conference with the Senate Republican leader.
The numbers are nearly all in now. What they show about what really happened during the eight years that Barack Obama was president is sometimes different from what politicians claimed.
Republicans and Democrats are making competing claims on whether the latest GOP effort to repeal the ACA continues to protect those with preexisting medical conditions. Under the Graham-Cassidy bill, insurers couldn’t refuse to sell policies, but they could price plans based on health status in states that allowed it.
President Donald Trump said “bailouts for insurance companies” would “end very soon” if Congress didn’t pass a new health care bill. Sen. Susan Collins said the payments aren’t a bailout, “but rather help people who are very low-income afford their out-of-pocket costs.” Trump distorts the facts.
President Donald Trump said that by allowing insurers to sell plans across state lines, “your premiums will be down 60 and 70 percent.” We couldn’t find any study supporting such a decrease, and experts we consulted disputed the idea that overall average premiums would decline significantly.
The GOP’s Better Care Reconciliation Act would affect premiums on the individual market in different ways, depending on individual circumstances.
Vice President Mike Pence went too far in claiming that a new report showed that “the average premium across this country has actually doubled under Obamacare.”
Democrats say the House Republican health care bill would throw 24 million people off their health insurance. But the Congressional Budget Office said that figure includes some who would choose not to have insurance and some who would have had coverage in the future under current law.
So, was the Congressional Budget Office really “way, way off … in every aspect” of how it predicted that Obamacare would work, as the White House claims? No, it wasn’t.
House and Senate Republicans have released legislation to replace the Affordable Care Act. How do the GOP plans differ from the ACA? We look at the major provisions.